B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

Run on chemicals today, trying to work over the articial push of more caffiene than probably healthy. The zombie feeling of heavy liquid pushing through veins keeps my hands moving over keys and not much else. Exhausted and reeling with a dozen or so new things banging around my head- I think the plan to come to New York to New York and work is actually happening, rude reintroduction to 6:30 in the morning and all.

---

Gary Taylor points out the faults and glories of modern British theatre just when I can use the cheat sheet, neverminding the article is from last FEBUARY. Mostly excellent dissection of the danger in saying you could drop in to any culture and get a clear picture its political mood based on its theatre when your theatre has given up imagination for what works easiest, telling awkward stories about people not having sex. Taylor drifts from the point a few times, but nails the whole thing in the last two lines, making it clear that most of British theatre has as good a clue about its countries political feeling as your Mom does about your Che shirt from college.

The politics doesn't interest me; after a time it becomes so much preaching to the choir. The presentation does. Micheal Frayn's use of railway imagery in "Democracy" is worth it's weight in gold for the argument that manslaughter requires a mind governing the act, and in the corrupt train system (or the bloated corporate entity of your choosing) no such controlling mind exists. It's human potential in negative, greed and the pursuit of power reaching the point where thousands are left dead and there's no one to point the finger at, just the small pettiness of a crowd. To go into the added bonus of turning a symbol of power (the locomotive) on its ear, making it representative of a shaky bad idea thundering towards disaster would take a whole other post I don't feel like writing.

"Little Triggers" is a mess of broadcasted problems, the same as any bad relationship is to the peopl aren't in it. A meeting between a woman and the Other Man in her life that teeter-totters between cheap shots and genuine care, it started life as a clever idea and found its feet with a friend describing her relationship as complicated, in the same way that everything is. The connotations of a statement like that reverberate like church bells on New Year's: how much of the complication in relationships comes from not wanting to concede? He wants this, she wants that, so one sweeps the conflict of the other under the rug for the sake of staying together. How much drama is self-inflicted, takenon for the way your sheets smell in the morning or looks over coffee? What are you willing to do to keep from conceding this just isn't working?

First draft or not, there's too much in the finished pages that feels heavy-handed, to the point of putting a neon sign over the actors reading DANGER WILL ROBINSON. Notes for when I go back to them: the strained conversation of a relationship on its last legs is a thousand times more powerful than a witty barb. Realize how much direct abuse your characters will realistically take and substitute accordingly.

---

There's a hypothetical job thing hypothetically involving the sort of writing I've hypothetically wanted to do for two hypothetical years or so. Most of it depends on an email tomorrow when I'm a little more in control of the shit coming out my mouth.

posted by chris  # 12:40 AM